So now the President wants a “National Heroes Garden” eh? I guess he’s been studying fascist dictators again, has moved on from Mussolini, and discovered Francisco Franco’s “Valle de los Caidos” up the hill from Madrid, The Valley of the Fallen, which Franco billed as a national act of reconciliation after the Spanish Civil War, […]
By James McMurtry Our President cares an awful lot about statues commemorating officers of the losing side of our civil war, a conflict that occurred before either side of his immigrant family reached our shores. He’s not known for admiring those he calls LOSERS!, and he has no roots in the conflict. My father and […]
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Dispatch from Not Quite Rural Texas It must be Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, because, from my back yard, I can hear cattle in the auction barn on U.S.183, south of the Lockhart Airport. The sale starts every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. and the cattle don’t sound happy about this. The days are running […]
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By Gangstagrass with photo by Janet Mami Takayama The idea of unity through music may be a cliche, but for a cross-racial, cross-genre band like ours it’s what we do every day. It’s what we are. We play a style of music that a lot of people haven’t heard, a style many of them are […]
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A Rambling On Corona Time… Corona time is the walk into a zone that nobody anticipated or has experienced. It’s like living in a cloud. Quarantine, isolation, time apart, from people and things; a time to think, a chance to read, to cook, to walk and dream…to watch the President on TV…to be frustrated; to […]
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Before traveling to Arizona this past Tuesday, the President said he wasn’t concerned about the health risks of traveling because everyone in his entourage had been tested for Covid-19 within the past hour. “We have great testing,” he said. He and his, no doubt do have great testing. They can, and do, get tested whether […]
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John Prine I was sitting in one of those posture destroying school chairs in seventh grade when I first heard him. It was 1978. For some odd reason school administrative district number 35 offered a few elective class choices every Friday. I suppose the hippies were teaching by then and we were offered up a […]
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As I write this, there’s a strange April rainstorm hammering my studio’s roof and walls. Torrential winds lash at the windows, and small lakes are forming in the pockets of earth in my yard. My band hasn’t had a show since February—everything is cancelled. Instead of life as usual, we live in fear of a […]
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Photo by Nicole Mago Playlist by Ron Pope: http://ronpopemusic.com Right now, with so much madness swirling around in the world, I’m looking for music that feels peaceful. Each of these songs sounds so honest; listening to them is like being told a whispered story by an old friend. That’s the kind of listening I’m doing […]
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The Mercy Of The Road. I’ve been touring Europe for nineteen years – sometimes twice a year. In one sense it’s simply work. In another sense, it’s a mysterious adventure. I’ve had passports expire, illness, missed shows and all manner of carefully arranged travel gone wrong. I once woke at five am to […]
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